Walking home, I ponder about a love of art and I think about my love of the land back home, about the healing grace of wildness, and how difficult it is to articulate why conservation matters, why wilderness matters to the health of our souls and how a language of the heart becomes suspect. I wonder how it is we have come to this place where art and nature are spoken in terms of what is optional?
In an Indian village everything is related to the sacred and nothing is done without some sacrifice... If we are building a house, a hermitage or any other building, the craftsmen will come along and the first thing they will do is choose an auspicious day and hour. When the time comes for work to begin, they are all there for the blessing, ready to consecrate their work. They will not begin any work without that. When the work is coming to its fulfillment, ... there is another blessing because we can neither begin nor complete our work without God... The builder also relates to the cosmos. Building is a total act and therefore, it is totally consecrated.